How To Make Your SEO - REAL&nbspSEO

This YouMoz entry was submitted by one of our community members. The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding an unlikely case of hypnosis) and may not reflect the views of Moz.

Online marketers are anxious to see how the recently announced Google Penguin 2.0 update will impact their website marketing. For people who don’t closely follow Google’s algorithm updates, Penguin updates look for unnatural link patterns that might be a signal of inappropriate SEO tactics. In my opinion, the guidance that Google provides around big updates is vague and difficult to interpret. As a result, many bloggers fan the flames by being deliberately provocative, trying to create a sense of panic and alarm to get attention. Creating panic around a Google update is pretty easy to do.

I’ve been following the Google updates since the very first one and my answer to Google Penguin is what I like to call REAL SEO. I chose “REAL SEO” because real content is what Google wants, and SEO people love acronyms! No fear or panic needed with REAL SEO, just practical advice.

R is for Research

All SEO projects should start with research and not just keyword research. Jamming unnatural keywords like “pain free dentist in springfield” into your written content is no longer a tolerable SEO tactic. The aim is to produce content that is genuinely useful to the audience. REAL SEO research considers both keywords and the audience. There are several keyword tools that you can use, the easiest of which is the Google Adwords keyword tool. Make sure you select exact match when you run your keyword search.

Your goal is to find keywords that are:

Relevant to your business

Suitable for the type of content you want to produce

Have an interested audience as evidenced by the number of searches on the keyword

Not so hot, in terms of competitiveness, that you have little chance of getting your message through the crowd of other online marketers.

Research helps you build your editorial plan for content on your website and your promotional plan for attracting attention on other websites and social media.

E is for End-user Value

REAL SEO is all about creating content that others will appreciate and use. Use your keyword research, editorial plan and promotional plan to figure out what you can create that others haven’t. Of all the content on the web, how much do you think is horribly written or executed? Just because it’s been done doesn’t mean it’s been done well. It’s OK to look for inspiration from what’s already out there and do it better. A few suggestions:

Content Types:

Articles

Blogs

Newsjacking

Whitepapers or Guides

Infographics

Videos

Podcasts

Press releases

Engagement in forums

Approach:

Opinion

Controversy

Help and advice

How-to

Reviews

Compare and contrast

Humor

Make sure you stay true to who you are. If you’re naturally funny, don’t be afraid to use humor in your content. If you aren’t, don’t. Write something controversial (controversial does not mean offensive), pose questions, ask for opinions, create a sense of urgency or alarm. Sometimes it’s OK to create a sense of alarm—just not about Google updates!

A is for Analyze

Analysis is a critical part of REAL SEO. There are three main places where you need to analyze:

During the research phase – Once you have your keywords and themes, make sure you haven’t lost sight of your audience. It’s easy to get very focused on keywords and forget your goal of creating content that will be interesting to real people.

During the content creation phase – Tune the content for audience and the search engines. Both are important. For audiences, make sure you have well-written and structured content. Use images if it is a blog post. For search engines, make sure your target keyword is present and that you include your meta data and rich snippets.

After content is published and shared – Before Penguin, we could focus on search engine rankings and keyword referral data. Like it or not, changes to Google Analytics and Google’s crack down on search ranking data has limited these metrics. Who hasn’t been frustrated by seeing “keyword not provided” at the top of your analytics keyword data?!

With REAL SEO we don’t have to rely on those limited metrics! We can analyze results by looking at these metrics in Google Analytics:

The number of web pages that are getting traffic

The length of time visitors stay on the website

The call to action conversion rate

L is for Launch

After you’ve developed your content, you must execute a program that promotes that content across the web. A big part of launching a program is looking for ways to attract links to your website. Not easy of course, but a very important step for SEO.

Google and Matt Cutts would have you believe that people link to websites out of the goodness of their hearts. That may be true for a very select number of very high profile websites, but the regular guys have to work a little harder and smarter.

Here’s a list of ideas to help you launch your content and/or get your business mentioned on other sites:

Guest Blog - Use resources like Blogger Link Up to get notified of guest blog opportunities. Technorati is also a good resource for finding niche blog sites with guest post opportunities.

Contribute to articles - sign up for HARO (Help a Report Out) and engage with writers who will mention your business name and point to content on your site.

Post on BizSugar - allows you to share links to interesting content, including information you’ve posted on your website and on other sites.

Use social media to post links to websites where your content has been published. It’s OK to occasionally post links to your website but social media will do nothing for your business if all you do is promote content on your website.

Use YouTube for videos - Video blogging is easier than you think. This infographic breaks it down for you:

Email Marketing - Send a notice about your content to your email contacts and include a link to the content.

The more places you share your content, the better chance you have of attracting backlinks. Real backlinks. The kind of natural link profile that Google loves!

Conclusion

As we face the latest big update to Google, we need to continue to evolve our practices so that the fear of substantial issues with our SEO can be reduced. It appears that businesses that were penalized by Penguin 2.0 hadn’t heeded the warnings from previous updates.

I’m using my REAL SEO methodology to make sure that my team is clear on the new rules of SEO and understands how to improve what we do for our clients on a daily basis.

It's all about researching, finding value not just for websites but for customers. You want them to come to your website, and keep them coming back. Ask yourself, would I tweet this, G+ this, like this on facebook, etc. It's all about REAL SEO

Thanks for this excellent post. I do love your sentence: "Google and Matt Cutts would have you believe that people link to websites out of the goodness of their hearts". This is actually why little businesses are getting very upset listening at official announcements from Google - it is far from being suitable for a small guy...

dotchill - this is awesome. If you put this much effort into a post I want to work with you! Do you freelance, or what's the deal? I looked at your profile. What is HubShout? How do we make this happen for my clients?

Beside the quality content publication - the structural data aspect from Google (implementation of schema.org) is very useful and i guess the future website structure need to obey those data structure. So, to me in addition to normal on page seo (h1 tags, alt tags etc) schema.org is much more strong and effective for long run. Correct me if i am wrong.

Chad you will explain nicely about the Real SEO. Google has now become tougher and launches new updates to maintain the quality of his searching. All the steps are very crucial in SEO but I could emphasize on relevant keywords. If your Keywords are more relevant to your business than your sites get more rank.

Nice instructions, the layout is really easy to follow. How often should you post video blogs to your site? Is there a good best practice on developing video content and pacing out the release of said content?

"It’s easy to get very focused on keywords and forget your goal of creating content that will be interesting to real people."

A fair warning. Sometimes we get so caught up in SEO-ifying our website and our content that we forget the real audience isn't the search engines, it's our prospective visitors. Yes, you want to use SEO as best as possible to help position your website better organically, but at the end of the day the search engines aren't going to buy from you!

Good question. Youtube has a huge audience but Google controls the experience there so a potential customer may see related videos from a competitor. I think that if you can host it on your site with Wistia or Vimeo and use a video sitemap or a micro-format you are better off.

I've modified that a bit to say that "Content is King and Key." Good content is the foundation for SEO, social media, email marketing, etc... If you invest in the foundation, your whole online marketing program becomes better.

I think I understand how newsjacking works. I presume you have to get
the article out very quickly to be picked up in searches for the keyword
that's in the news. Is a press release the best or only way to get the
article out quickly? What if you post the newsjacking article as a blog
on your website? Will that work? Maybe you can whip up a nice
infographic about newsjacking, much like the one you have for video
blogging. Great post dotchill. Thanks!

Great post, I would only argue that "real seo" is marketing a combination of both offline and online tactics. If you are able to actually make a science of it and do "real seo" you will be one step ahead of your competitors all the time.

Nice post and the Combo of REAL is a pretty cool idea - but: in Penguin updates look for unnatural link patterns that might be a signal of inappropriate SEO tactics - inappropriate should be fat - in germany most of my clients think SEO is a real bad thing wich Google shouldnt notice or the domain is burned - so its hard to do my job here ;)

Just like to add to the blogging part, video meta data - It's a pretty powerful tool to add a rich snippet to your site. You can even do video sitemaps for your site and submit them to Google via webmaster tools. It's a pretty cool new tool.
Now that my little suggestion is over! Great post overall, quick question though:
What is newsjacking? - Haven't heard that word before and it sounds kinda interested!
I'll definitely be giving this a whirl and putting all the info into a quick powerpoint to share with my colleagues here, I think SEO's developed into for the search engines more into for the user - The title off this post should of been REAL Inbound Marketing :P (Though guessing you may of submitted this before the Moz change?)
Great post anyway Chad, good work!

I'd probably check out http://blog.eloqua.com/what-is-newsjacking/ to get an idea of the concept of newsjacking. I think it's a debatable subject that's borderline, but can bring some awesome results. Either way, I like the chart that shows you where to plant it.

Newsjacking makes it sound like something bad, but it's actually just simply taking inspiration from events that are current. I have been advising my clients for years to stay current with the news in their industry, the nation and the world and to use that as inspiration for their blog posts and to contribute to the larger discussion in their industries. Newsjacking does not mean stealing something and doing something crappy with it. It means using that news item as a jumping off point for a larger contribution (ie., an opinion piece) to the discussion.

I think guestpostsharks and rgranger do a good job of explaining. Putting it into practice is sometimes a little tricky.

A good client example for us was the recent news coverage of harassment of female soldiers. Congress was looking at some legislation to make it easier for them to get disability benefits. Our client, a veterans disability lawyer, put together some testimony for Congress and issued a press release related to it. That content not only ranked well on relevant terms but got them some nice referrals. It was a solid double. The home run would have been if a larger publication or trade group had picked up his story. If this sounds a lot like PR... it is :)